Experiential Learning: A Graduation Address
St. Martin's Academy 2022
A friend of mine recently sent me a note asking for a copy of this address I gave at St. Martin’s Academy last year. If you’re not already familiar with St. Martin’s, it’s a farm-based, Catholic, boarding school that a friend of mine and I founded in Kansas a few years ago. I served as headmaster there until moving to Michigan in 2020, and I returned to speak at their graduation last year.
Thank you for this opportunity to speak at one of the most important schools in the country… small but mighty.
As a former headmaster and co-founder of this school I’m grateful for this opportunity and would like to address a few remarks to the students, chiefly the graduating seniors, and then to the faculty and staff.
Our nobly-founded country was once full of courageous men and women with a passionate and philosophically informed love for freedom. We fought a war on our own turf to achieve more perfect freedom among men. There was no uprising or revolution that led to the Civil War, but rather, an argument that was developed and elaborated through the years since the founding and that was rooted in the Christian vision of what it is to be a human being and the inherent dignity of every human being.
This same country that did that beautiful thing has been gripped for two years now with profound cowardice. We proved that we love our individual lives, more than we love our families, dignity, conscience, integrity, faith. I won’t comment on whether there was a real threat or not—it’s actually irrelevant. How you act in the face of a threat is most revealing of your character. Our lives and health have become the idols we worship.
All this while we export death around the world through foreign wars and abortion—our own lives are valuable, but others’ lives are cheap, especially the lives of the unborn, and the young men who fight the wars we seem to start every time the economy lags…. Those lives are cheapest that are spent enslaved overseas in making the devices we are all addicted to.
In our country today the basic structures of a just society are fractured to the failing point. Our monetary system is failing; the government is hopelessly bureaucratic and corrupt; the biggest businesses seek to control rather than serve their customers; we have forgotten the fundamentals of biology; families are slowly going extinct; our military has been embarrassed by incompetent leadership and aggressive efforts at social engineering within the ranks; many of our Church leaders abandoned their duties to the faithful, shuttering churches, restricting the sacraments including last rites for those who most needed it.
I don’t know if we’ve seen the worst yet or not. Perhaps our civilization is long in the tooth and beginning to collapse into the inevitable decadence of all empires. The good news that Christians have seen empires come and go does not relieve us of an obligation to live and act in the time we are given.
For the Students:
Last year I published a translation of a poem by the Roman poet Horace in a journal called Arion. Horace lived shortly before the birth of Christ, a time when Rome was morphing from Republic to Empire. I had translated this poem a couple years earlier because I was planning to teach it to a class of sophomores at St. Martin’s Academy and could not find a translation that was any good. Horace, living as he did at the inflection point of republic to empire, seems to know all about the mess we find ourselves in in 2022, and wrote a poem describing what we might do about it. These seniors might remember studying this with me some years ago, but now as you prepare to leave this school, I’d like to take you through the poem one last time. If you remember it, you can say it with me.
Horace Ode 1.11
Do not wonder, better not to know, what end the gods hold in mind.
Whatever will become of me and you,
Leuconoe, don’t tempt the Babylonian numerology.
What will be is what we will endure:
Either more winters will follow, or Jupiter says this,
Which eats away the cliffs along the Tyrrhenian Sea
Is the final winter. Be wise; strain your wine; trim your long hopes
To a point. Even as we speak envious eternity turns fugitive.
Seize the day. Believe in tomorrow but barely.
Do not wonder. This seems to contradict the very premise of the education we sought to offer here at St. Martin’s Academy. The beginning of wisdom is wonder. But is Horace really speaking of wonder as we understand it? Is this wonder that is the engine of admiration? The next couple lines make clear what exactly is at stake here. Horace addresses his ode to a woman named Leuconoe who is curious to know about her particular future. So curious in fact, that she seems to have fallen under the sway of soothsayers and cheap magicians…the Babylonian numerologists who served out their exile in the Roman empire as charlatan fortune tellers. These are the supremely confident who know just what is in store for you and control you through their predictions. Perhaps today they would work for the CDC or NIH. This is not someone with a true sense of wonder, as in admiration for the unknown. This is someone whose appetite for self-satisfaction, whose curiositas trumps any apprehension of the real world around her. Fortunately for her, the poet is there with the gentle reminder. He guides her back to the real world and her proper place in it.
What will be is what we will endure. This deceptively simple line communicates a tremendous dignity which I would commend to each one of you. Also the word “endure” introduces to the poem the prospect of suffering. Being, it turns out, is full of suffering—this is Adam’s curse. We all suffer. No amount of wishing it otherwise, hiding behind a mask, or attempting to control your circumstances will save you from suffering. Christ alone shows us what to do with suffering. In the military before we’d go on a mission we knew would be dangerous we would make our peace with dying. When it’s your time, it’s your time. As Horace puts it, “What will be is what we will endure.” But make no mistake about it. This is not just morose passivity but a manly acceptance and endurance of adversity
Either more winters will follow, or Jupiter says this, / Which eats away the cliffs along the Tyrrhenian Sea / Is the final winter. These are incredible lines that describe the human condition in a fallen world. They describe the relentless assault of the natural forces of the ocean against the cliff. There is power and majesty here, but also suffering and decay. The cliffs are being eaten away. It is winter time, a time of death, or at best, mere survival. This is not the blooming efflorescence of the spring. This is the vital contraction of the winter. Each winter contains the seeds of final winter. Each death is the end of all time in miniature
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Be wise; strain your wine; trim your long hopes / To a point. This point in the poem represents a gentle volta, a slight turn from reflection on the human condition to an imperative voice. These are particular practical directions. Be wise, strain your wine, reminds you to be chaste, be sober, control your appetites, steward your resources. Trim your long hopes does not mean to despair, it does not mean not to have hopes, but to impart them with a particular end. Your life, your aspirations, your hopes should have a point.
Even as we speak envious eternity turns fugitive. Your life is fleeting. Also, the very limitation of your life, the fact that is bound by death, gives it something eternity lacks. Shakespeare tells us that the world is a stage. Let the fact that the curtain will someday drop give you a holy urgency in your vocation, in the part you have to play. And your life is a beautiful and great thing—live it head up and chest out.
Seize the day. Believe in tomorrow but barely.
For the Staff:
There is a resurgence of classical education in America today. This is important and hopeful. I will say, however, that most of these classical schools are missing something essential that they could learn from you here. Experiential Learning.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux in his treatise entitled On the Steps of Humility and Pride makes the startling claim that our Lord took on our flesh in the incarnation “so that he might learn by his own experience to be merciful and to suffer with us in our sufferings and temptations.” (108) This is a challenging claim as it seems to imply that Our Lord has something to learn and is not therefore perfect. St. Bernard clarifies the theological point by reassuring us that “He knew by nature, but not by experience.” “Just as he had not experienced wretchedness and subjection, so he had not known mercy or obedience by experience. He knew by nature, but not by experience.”
This point is humbling and inspiring. It reminds us of the gulf between God and us, His perfection and our falleness; but it also reminds us of the lengths to which Our Lord went to cultivate intimacy with us, to become approachable.
But there is another point that suggests itself. The saint describes two forms of knowledge: perfect intellectual knowledge as possessed by God in his divine nature; and experiential knowledge necessary for his human nature. Bernard says that God became man because, though he knew by nature, he did not know by experience. To defeat the impassable gulf between his perfect intellectual knowledge and our own embodied knowledge, God Himself chose the experiential mode of education. “Yet by that experience there grew, as I have said, not his knowledge but our faith, when by this wretched mode of knowledge he who had gone far astray brought himself near to us (Eph 2:13). When should we have dared to approach him if he had remained impassible?” (109) This is a profound truth acknowledged by almost no modern educational establishments in my knowledge. If you need encouragement in your pedagogical approach, take it here, from God’s own insistence on the experiential mode of education as proper to the human being.
Also, it bears mentioning that the record left by our Savior was no argument, syllogism, or even a book. These are all available, and often helpful to the faith, but we should not mistake them for the primary things. No, our Lord simply lived. And the record we have comes from men whose lives were irrevocably changed by simply living in proximity to His daily acts. As teachers in the experiential mode you know, and are here reminded, that no argument you can make, no book you can read, is as powerful as the simple acts of your life. You scandalize or edify your pupils simply by being. What a challenge, and what a privilege. Keep up the good work.